


My childhood spat back out the monster that you see

by marsellia_rose



Series: The world is just a teller and we are wearing black masks [2]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, Angst, Backstory, Fake AH Crew, Immortal Fake AH Crew, Jeremy-centric, M/M, No Proofreading We Die Like Men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 04:37:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9419075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marsellia_rose/pseuds/marsellia_rose
Summary: Jeremy'd never had an easy life. He'd grown up in Boston with nothing, moved to Los Santos with even less.Why would living in Los Santos be any different?Jeremy's backstory for Immortal Fake AH Crew au.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Fall Out Boy's My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark. Some of the scenes here are similar to the ones in the first story from this series, because parts of this story overlap with parts of that story.

Jeremy had grown up in Boston. 

He’d had both parents, not that he ever saw them. They were always busy working, trying to provide for him, make sure he had clothes and food and didn’t have to live on the street. (A lot of the times, they only succeeded at one of the three objectives.)

But still. They tried, and he’d give them that. They tried to provide for him. They tried to be good parents.

Didn’t stop him from going to bed hungry a lot of nights. Didn’t stop him from wearing hand-me-downs from second hand shops. It didn’t stop his growth from being stunted from malnutrition. 

It didn’t stop the bullying.

He was smaller. He dressed funny. He never had a lunch. He liked art. He didn’t have friends, or shiny new toys, or parents who came in during career day or other parent days. He didn’t watch cartoons or play video games. He never had money to go see films. 

They bullied him for just about everything.

He learned how to fight back young. He learned how to take the hits, ‘cause he was never quite fast enough to duck, and if he cried, it’d only be worse. 

He learned how to fend for himself, cause no one else would.

He was young, too young, the first time they crammed him into a locker.

It shouldn’t have bothered him. It was just them looking for new creative ways to bother him, to get a rise out of him.

He was stuck in there for hours before anyone came to get him. By the time they did, he was shaking, crying. He’d wet himself.

They never let him live it down.

He was 10.

\--

Eventually he got through high school.

It was rough. Sometime in the four years’ people had discovered that he was gay. It hadn’t been a big leap for them- he’d always liked art, and by middle school they were already calling him a faggot. 

But they hadn’t had proof till high school.

It’d been a dumb decision, but he was lonely and the kid was new and didn’t know his reputation and they’d been making out in an alley behind the school when the others found them. 

It only took the new kid a minute to throw him under the proverbial bus and side with the others. He’d sort of expected it, even if he did feel betrayed.

Eventually word got around to his parents. And that was a shock- he didn’t think they’d even cared enough to hear people talk about him. They were around even less now, working or going out or just in general not being around.

It wasn’t that they weren’t okay with him being gay. They didn’t throw him out or anything like that. They were just disappointed, and somehow that was worse, cause where did they get off being disappointed in him when they barely even knew him. 

It was part of the reason he left immediately after high school. He had no plans, just $2500 in his pocket that he’d saved up from dead end jobs and all of his clothes packed up in a backpack. 

He wasn’t really sure where he was going, either. He just knew he couldn’t stay in Boston any longer.

He ended up hitchhiking his way across the country. He took on jobs where he could, bought food from gas stations and truck stops. 

He ended up in Los Santos, California, about a month later, $500 poorer. 

He spent another $400 on a motel room. 

He needed a job, and fast.

But it turned out finding a job- a legal one, at least- in Los Santos was easier said than done, especially when you don’t have a permanent place of residence. 

Plus there were the gangs to worry about. You couldn’t get an apartment in most low end parts of town without having to pay a couple of bribes. 

He was fast running out of options.

And that’s when he met Matt. 

He’d already run out of money. He hadn’t had a roof over his head in a while, and he’d recently discovered that certain merits of spending the night with whoever was willing to pay. 

He had been hesitant, at first. But he had nowhere to go and no money and he’d always been good at making sacrifices, always been good at doing what he needed to. 

He’d always been good at surviving.

Meeting Matt had been sort of a surprise. He’d just been out on the street that night, walking along, when he heard the commotion from farther down an alley. He hadn’t been planning on intervening- he really didn’t want to get involved, especially since he didn’t know if it was a gang based attack.

But he was tired, and more importantly he was angry, and he’d always liked fighting, not that he’d ever been willing to admit it, so down the alley he went to investigate.

There were three men in the alley- two clearly ganging up on the third, a taller, lanky looking guy who really couldn’t have been any older than Jeremy.

“What the fuck are you looking at, kid?” The smaller of the two guys asked harshly, turning towards Jeremy. The other two did too, then.

He noticed then that the larger of the two had a knife. That should have deterred him, but between the way the two were standing and the way the guy was holding the knife he knew they were nothing more than basic muggers, novices at that.

He’d been in Los Santos for almost two months now. He’d gotten into plenty of fights with hopeful muggers- he wasn’t a very big guy, and in the loose layered clothing he wore he didn’t look like much of a threat.

He’d been in plenty of fights.

What was one more?

\--

So that’s how he met Matt. 

He learned Matt was a year older than him. Had moved to the city after his parents had died, hoping to someday open a garage and just get to work on cars. Only that’s easier said than done, in a city like Los Santos. And now he didn’t have anywhere to go, barely had enough money to survive.

He learned that Matt had been trying to save up, and had only recently lost his apartment- accidental fire, the report said, only everyone knew that wasn’t the truth, that in reality one of the lower gangs had set the building on fire because it hadn’t had protection, none of the residents had been paying for protection.

There was something about Matt that just made Jeremy trust him. So when Matt told him he could come with him, he did.

That’s how he ended up on Skid Row. But somehow, with Matt there, that was preferable. 

They lived there for a couple of weeks. Jeremy kept working, kept trying to save up money, but you had to have a decent amount to get an apartment in this city.

He met Matt’s friends- Caleb, a young doctor who could barely find work, who tried so hard to stay on the right side of the law and so desperately wanted to help people but could barely even help himself, Lindsay, who came and went form their lives as she pleased, ever the mysterious one, and Kdin, who struggled and struggled but who had a job as a waitress at a bar where no one would respect that she was a she, where people made derogatory comments but she had to take them or they’d fire her. 

It was living on Skid Row that introduced them to Trevor. He came up to their makeshift tent one night, all smiles and soft edges, even with the bruises on his face.

Jeremy only realized he was trying to steal from them because Jeremy didn’t trust him more than he trusted anyone else.

But they became friends, too, because he could understand why Trevor had done it, because while he could fight and fuck and do whatever he had to, Trevor only knew how to steal and con. 

He couldn’t stay with them, not then. He was still not sure of who he was, and what he was doing with his life, and he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t fuck him over. Which was fair. Trevor had clearly been on the streets longer than any of them- on the streets of Los Santos, at that. 

They lived on Skid Row for a while. Jeremy saved as much as he could, but they used some of the money for food. It was rough. They grew closer.

That was around the time their relationship stopped being strictly platonic. They never really made it official, but they understood each other better than anyone. They trusted each other.

They were the quiet, stolen moments of calm in a world full of hate. They were the eye of the hurricane for each other, an oasis in the middle of the desert.

Eventually they got out of Skid Row. Kdin helped, a lot, having been saving money for the three of them. And Caleb helped too- he’d gotten a couple of well-paying jobs, and had set aside some money for them.

They got an apartment. It was small, not much at all, but it was a place they could call their own.

Two bedrooms. A small living area with a couch and a table. A dinette table, and a small kitchen.

Trevor came to live with them. He hadn’t found work yet, but he was trying, really trying, and he was one of them. It was harder for him to find a job- he didn’t even have a high school diploma. 

Matt and Jeremy took one of the bedrooms. Kdin took the other. Trevor slept on their couch. 

It worked. They finally had a permanent place of residence. Matt got a job as a part time janitor. Jeremy got a job delivering pizzas and spent the rest of their savings on a bike. 

They were finally starting to catch a break. They started saving again- Matt still wanted to eventually get a garage, and they were all hoping eventually Kdin could work somewhere else and Trevor could get his GED. 

That’s when Jeremy discovered the boxing ring.

It was an underground thing, the sort that is both literally and figuratively underground. Bare-knuckle boxing was illegal- that law had been put into place after they shut down the rings that the gangs were making money off of. 

But he was good at it. Really good. He made $500 in one night, and he lost his last fight. 

Matt was concerned, obviously, but he also was willing to acknowledge that Jeremy was good at this, that he didn’t lose often, and that it was better than what he’d been doing before.

The guy that ran the pizza shop he worked at didn’t give a fuck about the bruises. 

That’s also around the time he delivered the first pizza to the Fake AH Crew. 

He knew who they were as soon as the Vagabond had opened the door. Everyone knew the Fakes- they ran this city. He knew better than to say anything.

He just handed over the pizza silently.

They tipped him $85, and he wondered if they were trying to buy his silence, or something else. He didn’t really care. It was more money than he generally made in a night, and he’d happily take it. 

It became a regular thing, too. He delivered to them every week. 

He learned quite a bit about them. 

He learned that the Vagabond’s name was Ryan, and that he had kind eyes and a nice smile. He learned that there was another man, Jack, and that the Kingpin himself, Geoff, was really just a drunken disaster.

He learned that they ate way too much pizza for high glamor criminals. 

And he learned that they were good people, even if they were the city’s biggest and scariest criminal organization. 

They seemed like good people.

(He knew better than to really trust them, though.) 

He’d been delivering to them for almost a year when he got arrested. It was a stupid fucking thing, really. It’d been an agreed upon match. 

But it was him they saw throwing the punch. Him that was winning.

So he got booked for battery. And when he tried to fucking explain, to tell them that it was a boxing match, that it wasn’t his fault, they tacked resisting arrest on top of that.

As they shoved him in the car all he could think was that he hoped Matt didn’t do anything stupid- he could take a couple nights in jail, but they really couldn’t afford his bail or fines. 

When he got to the station, hey booked him, and then let him have his one phone call.

He called Kdin. 

“Hey, Kdin? Yeah. I…I’m in jail.” A pause, as Kdin sighed. “Yeah…I know. Just…make sure Matt doesn’t do anything stupid, yeah? And Trevor. Make sure Matt and Trevor don’t do anything stupid. Fuck, just don’t let Trevor leave the apartment.” 

“Yeah, I won’t.” Kdin was nodding, even as she starting tallying their savings in her head and tried to figure out if they had enough for bail.

“And don’t pay bail, either, if it’s not a fine. We don’t have the money for that.” 

Kdin sighed on the other end. “Matt’s not gonna like that.”

“Matt’s not gonna like any of this.” Jeremy also sighed, leaning his head against the wall. “Look, I have to go. Just…don’t do anything stupid, yeah?” 

“Yeah.” 

Jeremy hung up, then, and headed back down the hall to his cell. It was gonna be a long night. 

\--

Matt was not happy when he learned that Jeremy got arrested. 

Kdin had told him. Told him not to do anything stupid, told him that Jeremy had called her. Matt wasn’t offended. He knew Jeremy had figured she’d have the easiest time reasoning with him. 

He was right, but still.

Matt immediately headed to the police station, and soon found himself arguing with the woman at the front desk.

“Listen, I just want to pay his bail and leave.” He said tiredly, gesturing exasperatedly at the woman. He heard the door clang shut behind him as he argued. 

“I don’t think you understand. Your friend here is in for battery and resisting arrest. This is Los Santos- realistically, we could be here all night before the damn paperwork goes through. Then, we’ll have to see if this is going to court, or if you can just pay the fine. So go sit back down, and I’ll let you know when I know more.”

Sighing, Matt stalked back across the room, slumping down into one of the hard, plastic chairs lining the walls. 

“Are you Jeremy’s friend?” He hadn’t realized anyone was next to him. He jumped, turning wide eyed to the person to his left. It was a kind looking man, with red hair and a large beard. Behind him was another man, facing the window. Matt immediately felt on edge. 

“Please don’t tell me he owes you money.” He knew Jeremy, knew Jeremy wouldn’t tell him if he’d had to borrow money for something. Knew how much trouble this could cause.

“What…no, he just…” The man paused, looking him up and down, and Matt felt himself frowning defensively. “He delivers pizzas to our apartment every week, and we got concerned when he didn’t show up.”

Matt narrowed his eyes at the two guys. So this was the Fake AH Crew- or at least part of it. And they’d willingly come to a police station. For Jeremy. “You’re the guys that give him $100 for like a $15 order.”

“Yeah, that’s us.” The man nodded.

Matt frowned at them. “What’s in it for you? He hasn’t asked yet, doesn’t want to ‘til he has to, but we all know you aren’t doing it out of the goodness of your heart.” Matt knew better than to trust men like this. They were high end gangsters for a reason, and it wasn’t ‘cause they were upstanding citizens. While neither of these two men looked particularly dangerous, Matt knew they were both packing, and he knew they could both kill him in an instant if they decided he was a threat. 

“Do you know who we are?” The man asked softly. Matt had never been a good liar, and decided that starting now probably wasn’t the best idea.

“Yeah. That’s why I want to know-”

“The fine’ll be $5,500.” The woman at the front desk sounded bored, and almost put out.

“Fuck.” Matt pressed both his fists into his eyes, before nodding to himself. “Alright. How long do I have to pay it before it goes up?”

“24 hours, but we’re keeping him here till the payment goes through.” She intoned.

“Fuck me.” He muttered. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Hey, Kdin. $5,500. How long?”

“I don’t know.” Kdin didn’t even miss a beat. “I’ve been collecting what money I know we can use, and it’s…not a lot. How long do we have?” 

Matt shook his head. “24 hours till it goes up.” Kdin sighed. “Yeah, I know.” 

“Well…so we don’t have time to make any more. We don’t have much saved. Where can I take from?”

Matt thought for a moment, nodding to himself. “Rent’s not due for a month, and I can see if I can get more hours…” 

“Do you think Jeremy still has a job?”

“No, I’m assuming after he got arrested they fired him.” 

“Do you…should I take from your garage savings?” Kdin sounded hesitant.

Matt laughed at that, nervous and angry. “You’re shitting me, right? Take it. It’s Jeremy, I can save it up again. It doesn’t matter.” He turned around then, staring blankly at the wall. They weren’t gonna be able to raise enough. “We can make do some other way. Just…collect what’s around the house, and call me back.” Hanging up and sticking the phone back in his pocket, he collapsed on the seat again.

“What’s your name, kid?” The man asked kindly.

“Matt.” He stayed bent over, his arms resting against his knees and his head bent low.

“How much money do you need?” The other man finally came back over from where he’d been staring out the window, having a quiet conversation on the phone.

Matt looked between the two of them, shaking his head. “I don’t need-”

His phone went off again. Looking down at it, he sighed, answering. “Yeah.” 

“We have $3000.” 

Matt stood up and started pacing. “Fuck, where are we supposed to get another $2,500? What can we sell?” 

“I can pawn my gun. I don’t really need it- no one has threatened me at work in a while.” 

“No. Kdin, no. We’ll find another way, don’t go pawn it.” Matt shook his head. Kdin needed that, whether she was willing to admit it or not. People were she worked were dangerous. 

He felt someone tap his shoulder. Turning, the other man stuck something in his hand. “Before you protest, I’m not doing it for you. I need the good karma.” Nodding at the first man, they departed.

Looking down at his hand, Matt found himself staring at several thousand dollars in cash. “Kdin? Don’t do anything. I’ll…call you back.” He hung up, counting the money. There were six $1000 bills in his hand. “Jesus.”

He went back up to the counter. “Here.” He handed the money over.

The woman’s eyebrows shot up as she counted the money, but she didn’t say anything.

\--

So Jeremy came back home.

He couldn’t find a job. Now he had this stain on his record, and in Los Santos everyone ran background checks. 

He could still fight, but the police were cracking down even harder on the rings, so it wasn’t quite a stable gig.

That’s when he met Grey Haddock. 

Haddock was a small time gangster- not anyone the Fakes would consider a real threat, but a danger to everyone else.

Jeremy honestly couldn’t tell you how he started running for Haddock. He just…did. Delivering packages, cleaning up messes. Nothing too dangerous or too illegal, and it paid well.

Matt wasn’t happy about it, but Jeremy wasn’t really in any more danger than he’d been in when he was boxing, so he couldn’t really say shit. 

It stayed that way for a decent amount of time. And it was fine- he was making far more money than he’d ever made before, and it finally felt like they were catching a break. They had enough money that Trevor could start taking classes, try and get his GED so he could get a job. 

But they’d been having to borrow money, to pay off their debts they owed to surrounding gangs- debts they never wanted, debts made up by gangs and enforced by them too.

Between that, and the possibility that the Fake AH Crew may someday come calling for their money back- or worse, a favor- Jeremy knew he had to work more and more. He had to save as much money as possible.

Which is why he let them convince him to start taking harder jobs, to become a low level enforcer. It was something he excelled at, and he made a lot more money.

He also was in more danger, but he just. Didn’t tell Matt. It was fine.

Matt did find out what he was doing- he never really could lie to him- but he hid his injuries pretty well. Even when they roughed him up, they didn’t leave too bad of marks. And while Matt protested, told him they had enough, he could look for a better job, Jeremy knew. He wouldn’t find a better job. Not one that paid this well.

And that was the thing. He was finally doing something. Finally providing for them. It meant they never went hungry. It meant they didn’t have to worry about rent. And it meant Matt could open his garage, meant Kdin could stop working at that bar where people made derogatory comments, meant Trevor could stop stealing and getting beat up. Meant maybe Lindsay would finally stay, instead of going wherever she went at night. 

It didn’t matter the shit he had to do. It didn’t matter that sometimes he couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about what he’d done. Because it was for them. They deserved the world, and he wanted to give it to them. 

So it was fine.

Until he got stuck between a rock and a hard place and ended up with a dislocated shoulder and a knife wound in his side. 

He should have just gone to Caleb’s first. But he knew Matt was worried, because he hadn’t come home when he was supposed to. So he stopped by their apartment, to let Matt know he was alive.

He hadn’t expected it to be a fight. But really, he should have.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Jeremy had shouted, when Matt had come at him. 

“Maybe I just don’t want to see you get yourself fucking killed, you ever think of that??!” Matt was livid, more so than Jeremy had ever seen him.

“I’m not gonna get fucking killed, Matt.” Jeremy angrily tried to ration. He knew they wouldn’t kill him. They just wanted him to remember his place, was all.

“Yes, you are, and you’re too fucking dense to realize it!” Matt was lashing out. Jeremy knew that. But he also was angry, and he didn’t need this.

So he just. Left. 

Went to Caleb’s. Caleb fixed him up, then, and he ended up crashing on Caleb’s couch. 

He ended up spending a lot of nights at Caleb. Caleb tried not to ask, not after the first night, but Jeremy knew he wanted to know what was going on.

He didn’t ask, though, which Jeremy was incredibly grateful for.

This continued for a while. 

And then JJ happened.

JJ was a nobody. Just a guy who ran the same circles as him. Someone trying to get a leg up in the world.

He threatened to pay Jeremy’s apartment a visit. Said he’d stalked him home a few times. Knew details about Matt and Kdin and Trevor’s lives.

So Jeremy did what he had to. He took care of the situation, made sure no one would even recognize JJ’s body when he was done with it. But he knew, then, that as long as he lived with them, Matt, Kdin, and Trevor would never be safe. 

They’d never be safe with him around.

So he packed up his shit into a bag and left. It was a shitty thing to do, walking out on them at three in the morning, but he never claimed to be a good person.

He left behind his phone. He didn’t want there to be anyway for anyone to trace him to them. 

He continued to deposit most of the money he made into Matt’s bank account. He wanted them to know he was alive, and he wanted them to benefit from him still.

He was grateful Matt didn’t change the account. 

\--

Eventually he stopped seeing Caleb, too. Caleb was just too pushy, fighting him to go see Matt every time he went to his place.

He couldn’t take it. And most of the time he could patch himself up well enough, so he just stopped going. 

He kept working for Haddock, though he worked for a couple of other people too. Pretty much anyone who’d have him. He did things he couldn’t think about- things that made him feel ill.

And it took a lot to make him feel ill.

He knew he wasn’t a good person, not anymore. But he didn’t have it in him to care about it- to care about anything.

He had nothing left in his life. The only reason he got up every day was to make money, so he could deposit it into Matt’s account.

That’s why he fucked up.

And because he fucked up, they punished him. They gutted him open, dislocated his shoulder. He’d already been hit with a shotgun spray.

So he went to see Caleb again. He hadn’t meant to. Didn’t want to get Caleb mixed up in any of this shit. He knew that anyone of the gangs he worked for operated in this area, and that if they knew about Caleb they’d hurt him.

But he didn’t know anyone else who could help him pull the shrapnel out of his chest and stitch him up, and his hands had been shaking so bad from the blood loss and the adrenaline that he knew if he’d tried he’d have just made it worse. Plus he was concussed, and he had a dislocated shoulder, and he knew that if he’d tried to set it himself he might have passed out, and then they’d be able to find him again.

He definitely hadn’t expected Caleb to call the Fakes. 

But as he was trying to leave, he opened the door and found himself face to face with Jack. 

“Are you supposed to be up?”

“No, and he’s definitely not supposed to be trying to leave. What the fuck, Jeremy?” Caleb came back from the other room, and Jeremy winced, turning to face him.

“I…they’re gonna come looking for me, and you don’t need this sort of shit in your life.”

“Yeah? Is that why you left Matt, too?” Caleb looked like he regretted it immediately after saying it. “Fuck, sorry. That was low. Sit back down on the couch, I have people taking care of the situation.”

Glancing at Jack, Jeremy nodded. “I can see that. I thought Matt didn’t want anything to do with any gangs?”

“No, Matt just didn’t want you getting yourself killed by any gangs.” Caleb said flatly, walking into the kitchen where a pot was hissing. “I made you soup, by the way. Jack, you can have some too if you want. Thanks for doing this, by the way.”

“It’s no problem.” Jack sat at the small dinette table in between the living room, where Jeremy was slowly lowering himself back onto the couch, and the kitchen, where Caleb was stirring a pot. “That’s what Geoff gave you his number for.”

Jeremy watched the interaction suspiciously. He remembered Jack, remembered back before he’d been arrested. He knew that this was a member of the Fake AH Crew.

He also knew it was who paid his fine way back when, who gave Matt the money to get him out of jail.

Maybe now they were coming to collect. Probably any one of the gangs he’d been running for would pay them back their full money’s worth if they turned him over to them. He knew better than to ask, though. He’d just wait and see what they wanted from him.

He laid down sideways on Caleb’s couch. Everything was just…so much, right now. And if they were going to kill him, there really wasn’t shit he could do about it. 

He passed out instead. The rest of the day, he flickered in and out of consciousness. At some point, Jack left. 

Jeremy stayed there for another couple of days. Caleb knew better than to press him, knew not to ask about Matt. Jeremy was grateful for that. 

Eventually he left, too.

Continuing working for Haddock, despite what had happened. Haddock took him back, told him not to fuck up again. He understood the message- next time, he’d pay with his life.

Jack approached him a couple of times in the next year. Offered him a job, or a place to stay. But Jeremy knew better than to trust that. Knew better than to trust him. He was just a more talented version of Haddock, and he wasn’t upfront about what he wanted in return. 

For all of Haddock’s faults, at least Jeremy knew where he stood with him. 

And then he fucked up again.

\--

He didn’t expect to wake back up. 

Didn’t know what to make of it. He’d been shot in the head, execution style. Left for dead in a back alley. He should be dead. It took him several days to reconcile what had happened. To realize that maybe he couldn’t die.

He ended up testing it. It wasn’t like he had anything in life anyway.

But eventually, he had to accept it as the truth, whether he wanted to or not.

And then he had to figure out what to do next. Who he could go to. And that’s when he remembered the rumors- rumors about the Fakes not being able to die, about them facing firing squads and walking away afterwards. 

So he went to their penthouse. He still remembered where it was, from his pizza delivery days. Asked them if he could stay- and he was willing to do whatever they wanted him to, as long as they’d let him stay. He had nowhere else to go, at this point.

And they let him.

**Author's Note:**

> Eventually everyone will get a sad backstory.


End file.
